Yesterday Seagate announced its transition to 1TB platters with its new 7200RPM-only Barracuda line. The move marked a significant change for Seagate as it is phasing out the Barracuda Green brand, and shifting the focus of the high-performance Barracuda XT. The Barracuda Green was a rebrand of Seagate's Barracuda LP, designed to convey the lower power consumption enabled by its 5900RPM spindle speed.

Seagate decided that the performance loss of moving to 5900RPM wasn't justified by the power savings. It believed that by introducing a more power efficient 7200RPM drive it could deliver the best of both worlds, negating the purpose of the Green line. For most desktops, Seagate has a point. The couple of watts you save by slowing down the motor aren't really realized in a system that idles at 60W and can consume over 100W under load. On the other hand, the performance drop is definitely noticeable. Hard drives have pretty bad random access performance to begin with, and slowing spindle speed isn't going to help:Come February 2012, if you want a Green drive, you'll have to shop with Western Digital.

I would prefer to keep it if not for power than for noise. I guess then for low noise either WD Green OR 2.5"

Fortunately it might take a good while before Seagates power over Samsung materialises, and for what little we know they might still allow Samsung to keep making their 5400 RPM drives. In fact that would be a logical reason for Seagate to drop their own, keeping Samsung HDD manufacturing for value drives at least for a while. Unfortunately for the next 6-9 months the harddrive price situation may mean more than any of this.

Good thing my four HD204UI's should last me a while(edit: local prices just reached tripled level, wow). Maybe some time in the future there can be single platter 7200 RPM 3,5" drives with better aucoustics and minimal vibration. It's either that or we're all moving to 2,5" drives, eh? Even low budget systems today are getting so relatively quiet that the harddrive noises stick out as sore thumbs.

Last edited by mkk on Fri Nov 04, 2011 1:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

Probably for the next 3-6 months. Flood waters have to recede. Then they have to clean up/rebuild factories. The downside to having just-in-time-inventory is there isn't much slack in the system. When you lose a third of the capacity, everyone screams.

Retail is the lowest on the food chain. First dibs of inventory will go to high volume OEMs.

Hard drive prices have really gotten out of hand. Upwards of $150 for 1TB drives that cost $50 a few weeks back? I wonder how much of this is price gouging to boost profits and drive long term prices back up though. In any case, industries need to learn that putting all factories for a component in one geographic location is a terrible idea. Anything from natural disasters to political unrest could shut down production worldwide, and those things are bound to happen eventually. It also doesn't help when there are only three drive manufacturers, two of which own 90% of the industry.

As an interesting side effect, I could really see this boosting sales of SSDs. If a system builder is putting together a lower-end system, using an SSD in place of a hard drive will be a much more attractive option than it was before, when you could find 1TB drives for $50 at Newegg, or 500GB for $40. Now, the 500GB drives are $110 or more, putting them in the same price bracket as far-better performing 64 to 80GB SSDs. Many of those with lower-end computers don't need hundreds of gigabytes of storage anyway, so they might actually be better off with an SSD in place of a hard drive. Those who need more storage could install their old drive as a secondary in the system, at least until the prices come back down.

Yeah, buying a prefab system today and boosting it with an SSD with the original drive put aside for storage suddenly got a more appeal. The big OEMs can keep selling systems with big drives for a while without raising prices since they gobbled up all the stockpiles when this mess happened.

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